Communication tools that control the visual presentation of data from a presenter to a viewer are known in the art. These communication tools exist in a wide variety of applications, including multimedia slideshow presentations, videoconferences, video phone calls, and video productions—both professional and amateur.
One problem with currently available technology in this field is the skillset required to create high-quality “professional” presentations. Aesthetics play an important role in the effectiveness of such presentations, to capture and hold the viewer's interest. In professional data presentations such as news programs seen on television, highly skilled, trained directors are required to determine and implement the appropriate transition effects displayed to a viewer when the presentation transitions from one camera view to another. Examples of camera views from transitions are made include a close-up of the person reading the news, a view of the person reading the news along with an over the shoulder graphic, a view of the person reading the news with a scrolling text box at the bottom of the screen, a full screen shot of a video clip, and the like. Examples of available transition effects include wipes, dissolves, fades, focuses, flying planes, pushes, pulls, cuts, and the like. An improper selection of the type and timing of the transition effect to be used during a given transition may inadvertently detract from the presentation, giving it an amateurish or unprofessional appearance. Thus, it is important that appropriate transition effects be implemented.
In today's world, many people untrained in the art of directing data presentations are called upon to create and give presentations to audiences of varying sizes. Because it is highly unlikely that such persons have sufficient training or skill so as to make appropriate decisions required to properly implement transition effects, their presentations are unknowingly at risk and might fail for reasons unrelated to the presentation's substantive content. To ensure that the audience focuses on the message of the presentation and not on its production quality, and to possibly even impress the audience with a highly professional production quality, it is important that such unskilled/untrained users have access to a presentation tool that will provide the functionality of a trained and intelligent director.
As an example of a shortcoming indigenous to present prior art multimedia slideshow applications, it is often the case that during a slideshow the presenter will deviate from a planned sequence of slides. With prior art systems, transition effects are pre-selected for the predetermined slide sequence (see, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,640,522, the entirety of which is incorporated herein by reference). In such systems, and when the slides are presented out of sequence, either an inappropriate transition effect is displayed (e.g., when the planned transition is from slide 5 to slide 6 with transition effect E to be displayed therebetween, but instead the presenter transitions in an unplanned sequence from slide 5 back to slide 2, transition effect E is displayed even though it is not aesthetically congruous with a slide 5 to slide 2 transition) or an unaesthetic default transition effect is used (e.g., a straight cut). When such “unplanned” and unaesthetic transition effects are displayed during a presentation, especially in the middle of a presentation incorporating aesthetic transitions, the audience's attention often will shift to the inappropriate and many times disruptive transition effect and away from the presenter's message.
Another issue affecting the quality of a presentation is the presentation's style. Style is a wide-ranging concept that encompasses aspects such as the color, shape, and font of any graphical elements displayed during the presentation. It has been found to be desirable for a person creating a presentation to be able to globally define the presentation's style without concerning himself/herself with whether each piece of a presentation fits in with an overall desired style. Further, it has also been found to be desirable to permit the global change of a presentation's style after it or even a part of it has already been created.
For example, if a presenter were to deliver the same presentation to two different audiences that would have two different styles associated therewith (for example, a presentation given to an audience of 7 year old girls and then given to an audience of 7 year old boys), it highly desirable that the presenter be able to globally change the presentation style without being required to laboriously and individually enter stylistic changes to each piece of the presentation.